Best garden design tips of the year....

On the Middlesized Garden I often interview garden designers, head gardeners and talented amateur gardeners, so in this video I'm pulling together the top design tips from the last year's videos and I'll put links to those videos and any other resources we mention in the description below. And if you're new here, the Middlesized Garden uploads weekly with tips, ideas and inspiration for your garden, so if you'd like to see the videos when you open up YouTube, tap subscribe. Let's start with pots. Dan Cooper of the online store Dan Cooper Gardening has a garden of about 20 feet by 30 feet, that's about 7 by 9 meters, and he has created the most magnificent colorful pot borders with tulips and he also does different flowers later on in the year, so let's ask him for his tips. So how many plants are involved in this space then? So there's a hundred pots about in this space, 50 on either side of the garden, and we tend to duplicate the plants because it gives more rhythm when they come up, so with the tulips for example try and have at least two pots of a variety because otherwise it gets a little bit disjointed and bitty, so two or four pots of the same variety is what we try and do, so I guess there's sort of probably at least 30 to 40 different plants growing in here at any one time. And you also do this with dahlias as well, so do you do the same process with dahlias? Yes, we have things like gingers and begonias and things in this space and again I would grow even more of the same variety during the summer months because it just makes it a little bit more restful on the eye to have more of the same thing rather than a hundred different plants, which believe me I would probably do. And there's more fabulous container gardening advice from Sean Mooney who's a garden designer who's created the most amazing colorful flower-filled wildlife friendly garden entirely out of pots in his rented home, and of course because he's now moved he's been able to take it with him. So did you have any failures with trying to grow certain plants in pots or can you pretty much grow any plant you like in pots? I think that you can grow more or less any plant in a pot, there is obviously an uphill struggle that comes with growing certain species in pots. As I mentioned I'm managing to grow successfully a Himalayan silver birch which does require quite a lot of water, however we also got a prunus avium, a wild cherry through the Trees for Londoners campaign from the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, which is not doing very well. And even though we water it the same, I think that ultimately it can't get its roots out and it's just miserable. So I think you do have to choose quite carefully about what you grow in pots which is why it's always helpful to have a chat with a garden designer before you commit any budget to plants. And indeed nurseries as well, if you're buying from a nursery where they grow plants themselves, then they would be quite a good source would you say? Yes absolutely, and I think speaking with nursery people and growers, they just want to share so much and I think one of the fantastic things about switching from a decade in marketing to horticulture is it's a genuine community of people. People just want to share knowledge and share resources so much and I have learned an incredible amount from nurseries over the past year and a half about what works well in containers and what doesn't. One of the most stunning borders I've seen this year is the naturalistic new perennials garden designed by Michael McCoy. So Michael we've just seen this fabulous perennial garden that you've designed and it has wonderful swathes of color and blocks of plants and it it just looks gorgeous particularly in the morning light. But I think people worry when they see this, how am I going to do something like that in my own garden? What would your advice be? My advice would be to keep the palette of plants as limited as possible and I'm usually thinking in triplets of plants of three fundamental shapes of something that's going to go bolt upright or kind of vase shape and have a very strong vertical presence something that has quite a strong horizontal presence and something kind of rounded in the middle and so I'm all the time thinking about juxtaposing those different shapes and it's quite possible to create a very satisfying planting with only one plant of each of those categories but it's really about contrasting shapes as much as it is about colors. If you've got the garden full and rich enough in textures and shapes you can get away with murder when it comes to color combinations. I think most home gardeners are too concerned about color combinations getting the color exactly right and not concerned enough about just getting it really full and textural enough you know that there comes a point where if the textures and the richness and the fullness drops below a certain level then it almost doesn't matter how cleverly your colors match because it's not going to be satisfying. Nigel Dunnett has this p3 rule where he claims that you really only have to have three things in bloom at any one point for it to be perfectly satisfying so it certainly doesn't ever need to be to come to a point that everything is in bloom and this to me is somewhat different to my experience say working at Great Dixter 30 years ago where Christopher Lloyd had this idea that you would want the whole border to be seriously dancing you know at a particular point in the year and then to tease out both sides with bulbs for spring and maybe some later things but to try and tease it out but to never compromise an individual peak of bloom whereas with a lot of this naturalistic planting it does seem like largely because of the repetition of things that you can get away with less of it being in bloom at any one time. In fact sometimes you see a really good perennial planting with only one thing fully in bloom but because it echoes right through the planting it's amazing how it can give the impression that a lot of the planting is is really dancing. I talked to Bill Bampton of the Diggers Club Heronswood garden and it's on a slope with sandy soil overlooking the coast so it's really not an ideal location for cottage garden planting but Bill will tell us how they make it work. Really look at what your site wants you to do with the garden and put aside some of your aspirations for plants from elsewhere and find out what will grow in your area, work with what you've got. For example here we've used a lot of succulents but we've used them in a cottage manner. The founders of the garden here Clive and Penny Blazey were inspired by the great English cottage garden tradition and they picked this beautiful site facing the sea on the but a lot of the cottage plants find it hard to manage here. So taking those plants and saying well what would be like a foxglove, what forms like a hollyhock and use plants from Mediterranean regions, some Australian plants, plants from all around the world and not focusing so much on the traditional palette but looking at the the function the planting is doing for you. So we've done a lot of unusual perhaps to some people things here we've combined lots of flowering annuals like cosmos with large aloes and agave succulents which again almost transgresses our usual thought of plant categories but if you just look at an agave as a sculptural element in the garden rather than all the associations we have with it of the desert but use it in a different way also a lot of succulents which are traditional dry climate plants actually have very lush foliage so if we take away our mind from knowing that they're from dry areas but looking at the lush green effect which we use a lot of aeoniums from the Canary Islands have a lot of green gloss glossy shiny leaves so they're fulfilling that function and I think if people take that they'll find that you actually have a garden that's a lot more unique in the modern world lots of gardens and places are becoming placeless or homogenised as we become globalised and really what makes your place unique is the soil where you are the culture of where you are and the climate and accommodating that for example here's a strange connection of right down the southern tip of Australia English cottage garden but that mash-up is actually far more interesting in some ways than a traditional English garden approach Going to the garden shows this year there was one feature that every single show garden had and to tell you what it was I'm going to take you back to BBC Gardeners World Live because the show had a theme of sustainability and wildlife friendliness there was a pond in every show garden and there were ponds of lots and lots of different types and for us gardeners I think it's really helpful that ponds are now taking over from water features 10 years ago if I'd gone to a show I would have seen a water feature on practically every garden but garden designers are telling me that water features above all are more likely to go wrong than anything else in the garden and it can be quite problematic when clients ask for one however ponds really don't go wrong even quite small ones seven years ago I made a mini pond in an oak barrel and it was before I started the YouTube channel so but there's a blog post that I'll put in the description below and in those seven years it has been no trouble at all I promise you I have done absolutely no maintenance however I did learn that shallow ponds or small ponds like ponds in containers do dry up quite quickly in hot weather or dry weather and you will need to top them up the other thing to bear in mind with ponds is obviously you need to make sure that babies and toddlers don't have access to them because they can drown in a few inches of water and because of this I really quite liked a couple of ponds I saw on raised beds they were both quite shallow but having them in the raised bed surrounded by planting or even by wildlife means you could enjoy seeing the birds land on them and you can enjoy the pond whereas a very small pond perhaps at foot level you might not see so much of and in Frances Tophill's garden she put together a whole load of old sinks recycling them now you could do this with any containers and the advantage of having lots of different containers all put together is that you can have different kinds of plants in each one of them you can have plants that like quite shallow water in some sinks and then you can have quite deep water in others I thought this Francis's garden really was very pretty and it also had a much larger water feature which was some agricultural tanks a big high tank and then a smaller tank with an overflow coming from the big high tank I've seen tanks like this at gardens like Great Dixter and the advantage of them is that you can just dip your watering can in them you don't have to wait for a water butt or a tap to fill the watering can it's a quick dip in and out so this is actually quite a nice practical gardening tip I know from your comments that many of us had an unexpectedly hot or dry or difficult summer this year but one garden style that really responded very well to this was rock gardens the rock garden used to be an essential element in an English country garden but it's very much fallen out of favor so I went to talk to Amicia Oldfield at Doddington Place Gardens where they have one of the great rock gardens of the early 20th century to see what tips we could pick up for our own gardens when the house was was bought from the Croft family Croft Fortress Terrier by my husband's family just before the first world war the woman who bought it who's still known as Aunt Maud she put in this rock garden rock gardens were very fashionable just before the first world war and also there's another garden quite near here called Mount Ephraim and they were putting in a and I don't know if they were buying with each other or whatever but they were both doing it around the same time and the story is that the stone came from a quarry near Maidstone and we came to on the train I'm not sure this is true and then came by steam engine up here not many people have got that size of a rock garden but there's lessons here which actually we can pick up from you know very small rock gardens and I think one of those is the stone which is the stone needs to be quite local doesn't it for it to look good yes for it to look right in the in the environment this stone is ragstone is Kentish ragstone which you see some houses are built in Kentish ragstone if you imported a different stone it would look really out of place wouldn't it was there any actual rock here do you think before or no because we're we're on the high on the north downs here it's very chalky but of course buying rocks is expensive garden designer posy gentles was actually given some rocks and that is worth remembering because if someone is clearing something like rocks from their garden they would have to pay to have them taken away so quite often they are happy to give them away so I'll go over to posy gentles and talk to her about how she created her rock garden area in her small town garden you can go and buy rocks like this under sort of several pounds each which is quite an expensive way to do it but you can also look on things like gum tree and facebook marketplace and sometimes people just have a pile of stuff they want to get rid of if you go and take it away for them when it comes to garden design I think a lot of us forget how important the house is but it's probably the biggest thing in your garden so I went to talk to author and stylist Francine Raymond about how to link the house and the garden so Francine where do you start when you start to think about connecting your house and your garden I'm very interested in color so I always make sure that the colors that I've used inside the house are reflected in the hard landscaping and garden furniture and obviously plants and things change but I do like to see a reflection of those colors in the garden another thing that can be quite a major element in a small or middle-sized garden is the so I'm here with Stephen Ryan and Matthew Lucas of the Horticulturalists video channel and they talk a lot about plants but actually Stephen's got some real interesting things in the garden in terms of sheds and he's just been telling me that when people come into the nursery because he also has a nursery called Dicksonia Rare Plants near Melbourne that they say I want something really fast growing so that it'll hide an ugly shed and so Stephen what's your reply my reply is always why have you got an ugly shed I mean really when you think about it we spend most of our lives working in a garden and I mean we renovated a whole house so that it wouldn't look ugly in a garden so why on earth wouldn't you renovate a shed and make it look attractive or make it a vista point for a walkway such as this one here to actually make something of it rather than hide it and apologize for it so Stephen now you've actually built one of these sheds yeah and but also you had a really ugly shed here when you started yes tell us all right so tell me first about the shed that you inherited and renovated all right well the shed I ended up with on the block it was very funny well it wasn't funny the original house burnt down in the ash Wednesday bushfires the shed didn't so there was a shed on the block and nothing else and it had been obviously built by the homeowner and it was made out of pieces of leftover corrugated iron of several different hues so and they were all over the place you know they had stuck another piece on top of another piece and with a flat roof so when we took over the block and built the house the house originally was flat roofed as well matched the shed but we decided to go up and put a second story on the house and what we actually did was we renovated the shed first so that we could use it like a template so we put a pitched roof on it to see whether the angle suited us we put finials on it to see how they looked we then put weatherboard walls on we then painted it the colors we were assuming we would like to paint the house so we were doing everything on a scale so that if something didn't actually work when we got to it we could then adjust it for the house so we used it as a template and it worked really really well so i was very pleased with it our colors we thought were good the pitches were fine getting rid of the tin walls was fantastic and we put a couple of little windows into it it's now an attractive part of the garden instead of just being something to put the mower in of course when you decide to redesign your garden or when you move into a new house it's very rare that you've got a blank canvas very often you're dealing with quite a lot of what's gone before some of which actually it would be great to keep so if you're wondering where to start with a neglected garden see this video here and do let me know what your main garden design concerns are and thank you for watching goodbye